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Note: The Rays did indeed add Josh Fleming, along with José Alvarado, who had been on the Injured List with a shoulder issue; the team DFA’ed Oliver Drake to make room for Alvarado on the 40-man. Trevor Richards and Brett Phillips were dropped from the ALCS roster to make room for Fleming and Alvarado. The Astros, meanwhile, added Chase de Jong and bumped Chas McCormick from their ALCS roster.

Sunday’s American League Championship Series Game 1 begins the next layer of MLB’s grueling postseason schedule, one where each club’s pitching depth will be tested by the best lineup they’ve faced all year without the grace of an off day for travel. Two teams, seven games, in seven days (if necessary).

Let’s touch on the narrative. This series pits an infamous-but-talented Houston Astros team, whose players are publicly engaged in cognitive dissonance as a means of self-motivation, against a Rays team sometimes incorrectly billed as an underdog because of its sparse, owner-imposed payroll, even though Tampa was the AL’s top seed. There’s the intrigue of longtime Rays employee (and new Astros GM) James Click facing his old club while he and manager Dusty Baker try to shepherd the franchise through a PR hell that’s probably going to last longer than the pandemic. Houston’s young pitchers (a well that never seems to run dry) led by breakout third-year lefty Framber Valdez and a slew of great rookies who can go multiple innings in relief, face a dynamic group of Rays hitters who run 12 or 13 deep, and punish opponents by creating tough, mid-game matchups.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Yesterday the Astros announced Valdez would start Game 1 on the usual four days rest, while ALDS Game 1 starter Lance McCullers Jr. will go in Game 2 on extended rest. Both work heavily off their sinkers and curveballs, especially Valdez, whose changeup usage dwindled throughout the regular season before totally evaporating in the playoffs. He threw no cambios in the Wild Card round, and tossed just four of them in his ALDS start against the A’s, throwing one to Ramón Laureano and Chad Pinder each time he faced them.

Blake Snell will take the ball for Tampa Bay in Game 1, and while they haven’t announced it yet, it’s fair to anticipate former Astro Charlie Morton going in Game 2 and Tyler Glasnow in Game 3, though that’s more an educated guess than a certainty. In Friday’s ALDS Game 5, Glasnow threw on two days rest, his bullpen day, meaning Sunday’s Game 1 would be his scheduled day to start if the Rays just replaced his routine bullpen with his Game 5 outing. I think the structure of the Championship Series (seven games in as many days) means we’re unlikely to see an extended outing from Glasnow early in this series (he threw 93 pitches in his first ALDS start) since there’s an old-school style importance to starting pitchers going deep into games, forcing Tampa Bay to start and get bulk innings from Glasnow rather than piggybacking him. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Wilken was the club’s scouting director when the Chicago Cubs drafted DJ LeMahieu out of LSU in 2009. Wilken was still ensconced in that position two years later when he had a memorable exchange with the second-rounder. It took place in Knoxville, where LeMahieu — a product of Brother Rice High School in metro Detroit —was playing with the Double-A Tennessee Smokies.

“I said, ‘Hey, DJ, you stay inside the ball extremely well [but] you’re six-foot-five and don’t really let your swing out,” Wilken related to me recently. “You’re from Michigan; were you a fan of Derek Jeter? Do you stay inside the ball because he does that?’ He said, ‘No, I like Derek Jeter, but when you live in a northern state you have a tendency to stay with your swing because 95% of your BP is inside, in a cage. Had I lived in a sunbelt state, I might have started to let my swing out.’”

I asked the longtime scout — now a special assistant with the Arizona Diamondbacks — why a lack of outdoor reps might have that result.

“If you’re in a cage — and I’ve seen many cage batting practices — hitters kind of stay within their swing,” responded Wilken, who in 2016 was inducted into the Professional Baseball Scouts Hall of Fame. “LeMahieu hits a lot of balls up the middle and to the right side — every once in awhile he’ll pull a ball — but as he was describing to me, it’s a lot different inside. You don’t get to see the results of letting your swing out, so you don’t really turn on balls. Outside, you can see some of that power. Hitting a ball to left field and seeing it go a pretty good ways… that’s taken away when you’re in a cage.” Read the rest of this entry »

There are stories athletes must tell themselves to kick in an extra gear of motivation totally foreign to many of us. To feed the adrenaline that needs to flow through your body in order to square up a fastball thrown at 100 miles per hour. They are stories about the athlete being under attack; by a public that doesn’t believe in them, by the media that unfairly targets them, by the rival who has crossed and provoked them. Some of those stories are completely true, others less so — most people probably expect professional baseball players to do well, and the grudges they hold may be ones we aren’t aware of.

Everyone, however, was aware of the grudge between Mike Brosseau and Aroldis Chapman. The heater Chapman threw at Brosseau — who dodged it at the very last moment with mere inches to spare — has been replayed and analyzed since it caused the benches to clear during an otherwise quiet game on September 1, and served to ratchet up a tense division rivalry. So when Brosseau came up to bat against Chapman with the game tied in the bottom of the eighth of Friday’s do-or-die ALDS Game 5, the idea of the at-bat deciding both team’s seasons was simultaneously far-fetched and a narrative far too convenient.

Ten pitches later, Brosseau’s swing made the far-fetched reality. That terrifying fastball darted not toward his head, but over the inside corner of the plate, and Brosseau snuck the barrel of his bat through the zone just hard enough to send the ball over the Petco Park fence, and the Rays’ dugout into pandemonium. It was the go-ahead run the Rays needed to defeat the Yankees, 2-1, and punch their ticket to the ALCS.

The Rays will face the Houston Astros in Game 1 of the ALCS on Sunday at 7:37 p.m. EST. Read the rest of this entry »

7:01	Dan Szymborski: It is a time for baseball.

7:02	Dan Szymborski: I’m just glad we got *a* Game 5!

7:02	Dan Szymborski: Between two and four runs allowed, margin of error six!

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Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball, which has just gotten underway, and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West and Central. Below is my assessment of the AL East, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers are a machine. They’re star-studded, of course — Mookie Betts, Corey Seager, Cody Bellinger, Walker Buehler, Clayton Kershaw. I almost don’t know where to stop naming Dodgers. They’re deep, too — their role players could start for most teams, and their development pipeline keeps churning out relievers and shockingly good catchers, more than any team has a right to.

This is an article about Game 3 of the Dodgers-Padres NLDS, during which Los Angeles eliminated San Diego to advance to the NLCS. Don’t worry, there will be a tick-tock of who swung at what, who caught what, and when the damage was done. But I couldn’t stop thinking of a very old poem when I was watching the Dodgers, and honestly, that poem has more drama in it than this game did.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is, in theory, about hubris. Heck, it’s about hubris in practice, too. As every high school English teacher in the world can tell you, the imagery of an old, decrepit statue proclaiming its greatness even as it slowly crumbles into nothingness is a lesson in humility — you might think you’re great, but time wounds all heels. Soon enough, it will all be in the past.

Someday, that will be true of the Dodgers. Bellinger and Betts will get old and retire. Kershaw will be an old-timer who shows up at the stadium once a year for a celebration of his career. Julio Urías or Dustin May might leave the team; the Chris Taylors and Max Muncys will stop panning out quite so well.

As of yet, however, the Dodgers haven’t declined. They’re at the peak of their powers, Ozymandias in his own time. They towered over the Padres, made them look small. Baseball isn’t the kind of sport where you can dominate your opponent; on any given night, the margin separating victory and defeat is small and largely made of random chance, whether a ball eludes a glove or a bat misses the sweet spot by a fraction of an inch. And yet, the Dodgers just seemed better, like San Diego was accomplishing something merely by keeping even. Read the rest of this entry »

Beyond Giancarlo Stanton going electric and Gerrit Cole proving that investing $315 million in him was one of Brian Cashman’s better decisions, not a whole lot else has gone right for the Yankees against the Rays. Going into Game 4 needing a win to stay alive, they’d found no answer to the Ruth and Gehrig cosplay of Randy Arozarena and Ji-Man Choi. They’d struggled to do much of anything when faced with Tampa Bay’s best relievers. Most of the lineup aside from Stanton, Aaron Hicks, DJ LeMahieu and (unexpectedly enough) backup catcher turned starter Kyle Higashioka hadn’t shown up. New York had come by its series deficit and a potential trip home fairly.

But the biggest problem for the Yankees in this series is the one that was the biggest problem in the 2019 playoffs and the biggest problem in the 2018 playoffs and the biggest problem in the 2017 playoffs: a pitching staff that hasn’t performed consistently. Granted, that’s a small sample, with only six starts so far and two of those belonging to Cole. But Masahiro Tanaka, normally the postseason stalwart, has been bludgeoned in his two turns, including Game 3. Aaron Boone’s attempt at a Rays-style opener gambit in Game 2 quickly went pear-shaped. Game 4 rested on Jordan Montgomery, who hadn’t pitched in over two weeks and could at best provide three or four innings in what would be his postseason debut. If he went south early, making it to Game 5 was highly unlikely.

Yet for the first time this month, Boone got a capable start from a non-Cole pitcher, and his bullpen was able to hold it together for a 5–1 win. Even better, Game 5 will be in the hands of Cole, who held the Rays in check in Game 1, bulldozed the Indians in the Wild Card round, and would be a popular pick league-wide for “man you most want on the mound in an elimination game.” Read the rest of this entry »

For a little while there, everything was going the way the A’s drew it up. Thanks to — you guessed it — a homer, they had a 3-0 lead entering the bottom of the fourth. Zack Greinke, though generally effective, had allowed consecutive singles to Matt Olson and Mark Canha in the top of third; he hung a 3-2 slider to Ramón Laureano, and the A’s jumped out ahead. Meanwhile, Frankie Montas had managed to face the minimum through his three frames, outside of Yuli Gurriel reaching base on an Olson error. After the Laureano homer, the A’s win expectancy jumped to 76.4%. It wasn’t just that they had a chance to win, to stay alive and push this ALDS to a winner-take-all fifth game; they had a good chance.

It was all the more astonishing, then, how quickly the wheels fell off for Oakland, how quickly the Astros swung the game in their favor, taking it to a point of no return. Though the A’s offense did their best to rally, the scale of the thumping the Astros lineup put on Montas and a desperate, ineffective succession of A’s relievers was, in the end, too much for them to overcome. With a final score of 11-6, the Astros make their way into their fourth consecutive ALCS, while the A’s make their way home after yet another postseason heartbreak.

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There’s a moment in almost every Clayton Kershaw postseason start where the entire enterprise threatens to swing completely off its axis — where the boulder, finally nearing the top of the hill, begins its inexorable roll back down, leaving the three-time Cy Young winner flattened underneath it. It never happened in the Wild Card round, when Kershaw sliced and diced a punchless Brewers lineup over eight scoreless innings, but it arrived in Game 2 of the NLDS against the Padres in the sixth inning, when two pitches and two swings seemed like they would undo all of the veteran lefty’s hard work.

Clayton Kershaw is not Clayton Kershaw™ any more. At the same time, he is neither bad nor finished, and his 2020 was a resurgence previously hard to imagine for a 32-year-old man with 2,300-plus innings on his arm and a wobbly back that shifts and grinds like tectonic plates. He made 10 starts and threw 58.1 innings and struck out 62 batters and posted a 2.16 ERA, a hair off his 2.13 mark in 2016, the last year when he was really, truly the best pitcher in baseball. Since then he’s been more passable imitation of himself than the genuine thing, but this season was proof that he could adjust and thrive despite a fastball that’s past its peak.

The trick to Kershaw’s success, as Ben Lindbergh noted over at The Ringer, is that he starts off with that fastball — which, after dipping to an average of 90.5 mph, a career low, in 2019, rose back up 91.6 this year and got up to 93–94 — and then goes to his slider. It’s a winning strategy for several reasons: Hitters tend to let the first pitch go, allowing Kershaw to pump in strikes and get ahead; and his slider is a monster of a pitch. None of that likely works without that four-seamer getting a little more life on it, but Kershaw also has smarts and savvy and spin on his side, and he can reach back and find his old self albeit without the heat.

So it was against Milwaukee and so it looked against San Diego. For the first five innings, Kershaw stuck to his plan: 19 first-pitch fastballs out of 24 offerings, 45 fastballs total averaging 91.7 mph and peaking at 93.6, lots of two-strike sliders. And for five innings it worked, aside from a Wil Myers RBI double in the second on a slider that caught too much of the plate; otherwise, weak contact and strikeouts abounded. Read the rest of this entry »